IT SEEMS the gloves are off in the race to find the Higgs boson.
Teams at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, have recently issued a spate of bold announcements about their search for the Higgs, which is thought to give other particles mass. For example, they claim that the Tevatron has a 50:50 chance of finding the particle.
Some researchers at the Large Hadron Collider, due to power up later this year, have apparently had enough. In a talk at CERN last week, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich of exaggerating their prospects, arguing that the sensitivity of their machine has yet to match predictions. Tevatron鈥檚 search for the Higgs 鈥渨as, is and remains hopeless鈥�, Dittmar says.
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CERN鈥檚 spokesman James Gillies stresses that the rivalry between the Tevatron and LHC is good-natured. 鈥淭hey鈥檝e got press release friendly recently, but they鈥檝e had some good stuff to report,鈥� he says. Dittmar鈥檚 presentation was his personal view, he adds.
鈥淭he rivalry between researchers at the Tevatron and LHC over the Higgs boson is good-natured鈥�
Some researchers at the Tevatron have angrily disputed Dittmar鈥檚 claims. Tommaso Dorigo at the University of Padua, Italy, was in the audience during the talk. 鈥淚 felt I was wasting my time listening to him,鈥� he wrote on his blog .